VCT 2026 Season Capsule goes on sale with an equal split for teams

Valorant players will be able to buy the 2026 VCT Season Capsule from Thursday, February 19, and the money it brings in will not go to one team but to all of them. Riot Games, the publisher of the game, announced the capsule on February 13 and described it as offering an equal revenue split across the VCT, the Valorant Champions Tour, its top-level competitive circuit.

The capsule is the second set of esports items of the season. It follows the 2026 Team Capsules, which went on sale on January 13 and which each carry the colors of one team.

The difference between the two matters to the teams. A team capsule earns in proportion to how many fans of that team buy it; the season capsule, by Riot's description, is shared out evenly whatever the club's following.

Riot Games, posts of February 13, 2026 (Season Capsule) and January 6, 2026 (Team Capsules).

What the capsule contains

Riot's post lists three kinds of items. The centerpiece is the VCT Sigil, a charm for the melee weapon inspired by the arenas the circuit plays in around the world. It comes in four regional variants, one for each of the circuit's International Leagues, and one general VCT variant, five in all. It has custom animations, and the top fragger of a match, the player with the most eliminations, activates an effect Riot calls the Champions Aura.

The second item is a set of four animated Regional Player Cards, each showing agents chosen to represent one International League. Agents are the playable characters of Valorant. The third is the VCT 2026 Flex, an animation players can show in game to support the circuit, whose design draws on the trophy of the VCT Kickoff, the tournament that opens each season.

The capsule goes on sale worldwide in the in-game store on February 19 at 11am Pacific time. Riot's post does not give its price.

The International Leagues are the four top-tier regional leagues of the circuit.

One capsule for the whole circuit

Riot sells two kinds of VCT items through the season, and they are built differently. Team Capsules let a fan back one team. The Season Capsule, Riot writes, offers an equal revenue split across the VCT instead, and its items are built around the leagues and their regions rather than around clubs.

The 2026 Team Capsules show what a team product looks like. They went on sale on January 13 at 11am Pacific time, and Riot presented each purchase as direct support for that team through the season. Each one holds an updated Classic skin with new visual effects, an achievements tracker that records the team's event wins, an animated player card, a team spray and a team gun buddy, a small charm that hangs from the weapon. The price was set at 2,320 VP, the in-game currency in which Valorant's store prices are given, or 1,650 VP for a buyer who already owned the same team's capsule from 2024 or 2025.

Results are built into the design. A team with a championship title gets an exclusive Winner's Flair on its capsule, and NRG's carries Champion's elements, which Riot illustrated with the team's run to the Champions 2025 title.

That is exactly where the Season Capsule differs. Nothing in it is tied to a club, and nothing depends on which club a buyer follows.

What Riot publishes and what it leaves out

The February 13 post is short on numbers. It gives no price, no share of revenue as a percentage, no number of teams in the split, and no end date for the sale. The equal split is stated as a principle, without the method that applies it.

The same was true a year ago. Riot's post of February 2, 2025, on the 2025 Season Capsule, said the capsule would drive an equal split of revenues to every team in the VCT, and in its body that a portion of the proceeds would go back to every team. It gave no percentage either. That capsule was built around a VCT Karambit, a knife Riot described as the first skin with five chromas, color variants of the same skin, alongside four regional player cards, designed to celebrate the identity of each International League, and four gun buddies, reactive charms that each represent a region. It went on sale on February 6, 2025, at about 2pm Pacific time, and Riot said it would remain available until the end of Masters Bangkok. The same post presented it as a celebration of the competitive season, built on pride in a region and its league, and as a way to support every team in the league.

Of these Riot posts, only one gives a percentage. Its post of August 30, 2025, on the Champions 2025 Collection, states that 50% of net proceeds from that collection would be shared with VCT teams. That collection, a Vandal rifle skin and a Butterfly Knife with a Flex, a gun buddy, a player card and a spray, went on sale on September 4, 2025, for a limited time before Champions.

The 50% belongs to that collection alone. Riot's pages do not say that the same rate applies to the Season Capsule or to the Team Capsules, and it cannot be carried over from one item to another.

From US$44 million to US$100 million

What Riot does publish is a running total. Its post of February 2, 2025, said fans had helped generate over US$44 million for partnered teams through esports cosmetics in 2024. The 2026 Team Capsules post gives the next figure: Riot, it says, shared US$100 million with VCT teams in 2025.

The two figures are Riot's own and are worded differently: the first counts money raised through esports cosmetics for partnered teams, the second what Riot shared with VCT teams. Riot's Champions 2025 post, for its part, put the 2024 total raised by esports bundles at more than US$40 million. None of the pages breaks the totals down by item or by team.

Read side by side, they do not show how much of the 2025 total came from capsules, from the Champions bundle or from anything else, and Riot has not said.

The season the capsule follows

The capsule arrives a few weeks into a season Riot has reshaped. Its first look at the 2026 circuit, published on October 3, 2025, introduced a new triple-elimination format for the Kickoff, in which a team must lose three times to be knocked out. The top three teams of the Kickoff qualify for Masters Santiago, the first global VCT event held in Latin America.

The rest of the international calendar was named in the same post: Masters London, the first time the United Kingdom hosts a global VCT event, and Champions Shanghai, which Riot called the year's biggest stage, where the world champion of 2026 will be crowned. The post gave no dates for the three.

Two other changes concern money and access. The Challengers leagues, the tier below the International Leagues, no longer feed the top level through Ascension, the promotion tournament of earlier seasons. Instead, each International League takes four Challengers teams into its Stage 2 Playoffs, a system Riot calls Path to Champions, and those teams receive a cash stipend to help with travel and attendance at the playoffs. The finals of the Stage 2 Playoffs become destination events for every league.

The teams that reach Champions, Riot added, will receive significant compensation from digital goods tied to the event. It gave no amount.

What comes next

The Season Capsule goes live on February 19 at 11am Pacific time. Riot's post does not say how long it stays on sale; Riot had announced that the 2025 edition would stay in the store until the end of Masters Bangkok.

For the teams, the next global stop is Masters Santiago, which takes the top three of the Kickoff; Masters London and Champions Shanghai complete the international calendar Riot named in October.

The amount each team receives from the Season Capsule is not public, and Riot's pages give no date for a breakdown. What the publisher has given so far is a yearly total: the 2024 figure in February 2025, and the 2025 figure in January 2026.

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